When I was younger, my low-budget PC struggled to run most games, so I made it a habit to shut down any unused background programs, virus scanners, and services before every gaming session.

Nowadays, I'm older, have a real job, and am fortunate enough to be able to spend more money on my beloved hobby. With a high-end CPU and two high-end GPUs in SLI, I have the luxury of being able to just boot up a game, put all settings to max, turn on 3Dvision, and enjoy what is usually a smooth, sumptuous gaming experience. But I started wondering: was I hurting my performance by forsaking this old habit? Could I still get a noticeable boost by shutting off a few programs before I launch a game?

Conventional wisdom says that 'No, those days are over': today's CPUs are much better at multi-tasking, so leaving background programs running shouldn't impact gaming in any serious way. Still, I decided to find out for myself, if only for peace of mind.

Testing Methodolody

I tested 5 games, using their built-in benchmarks for accuracy. I did several runs in each test, and averaged the results. I first tested them with a bunch of background programs and processes running (see list below). Then, I disabled all of those background apps, and tested again. These were the background programs in question:

Evernote

MediaMonkey (idle)

Folding@Home (idle)

Google Chrome (system tray only)

xmouse

logitech gaming software

Fraps

fitbit connect

razer synapse 2.0

corsair vengeance mouse config

Aida64

Nvidia geforce experience

Microsoft Security Essentials (real-time protection turned on)

Display Fusion Pro

Google Drive

Thunderbolt Software

Epson Event Manager

Phew! Quite a list - and those are just my everyday startup programs! OK. below are the FPS results, both bef﻿or﻿e and ﻿﻿a﻿f﻿﻿te﻿r ﻿disabling all those background programs.

The FPS (frames-per-second) results are rounded to the nearest whole number, but the graph bars themselves shows the original un-rounded data. That's why you can see tiny differences between some of the bars, despite their respective FPS figures being the same.

As you can see, the difference is basically zilch. Certainly nothing meaningful. This is bad news for anyone who was hoping to pluck some extra performance by emptying their system tray. But personally, I'm relieved, as it means I won't ever feel compelled to go through that tiresome ritual of closing everything before each game session.

It might be argued that, because my PC is pretty high-end, it doesn't make a good test sample, and that closing background applications might have a more pronounced effect on low-end PCs. Perhaps - I can't promise otherwise - but I doubt it.

Remember: I stressed my PC by setting all settings to max, and in the case of Hitman and Metro, my PC was struggling to produce barely playable framerates. Yet there was still no significant difference between before and after.

Caveat

This is all well and good for programs that are robustly designed and behave as intended. But some programs are just stinkers, and take up way more resources than they should. Ferric in the comments mentions that Spotify has a large impact on their system.

Another culprit is ﻿xboxstat.exe﻿. It's a piece of official Microsoft software that comes with the xbox gamepad controller, but it is a horrible resource hog. Get rid of it. It is completely unnecessary for the gamepad to function properly, and it has been known to consume crazy amounts of resources. On my system, it regularly consumed 13% of CPU even when not idle. Others have reported it consuming as much as 90%! I've written a guide on how to safely remove it towards the bottom of my Razer Sabertooth article (but you don't need to own a Sabertooth to be affected - xboxstat.exe actually comes with the official Microsoft xbox gamepad driver).

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I think it all depends on what type of program you have running in the background. For example, I've noticed a major hit in fps when I have spotify running in the background. I have a gtx 670 with a ivy bridge I5. I haven't bench marked how much of a reduction I get in fps, but it was enough to kick my vsync from 60fps down to 30fps. A huge difference!

Reply

Dave

2/10/2015 11:38:44 am

That's good to know, ferric. I tested a lot of programs, but obviously that's just a tiny fraction of the software that's out there.

But it sounds like Spotify might just be a pretty lousy program though, if it's having such a huge difference all on its own.

I don't think I've ever had such a dramatic impact from any music or bandwidth-heavy programs. I can have Google Chrome open with several tabs, plus Steam downloading a game, without much of an impact on my FPS.

This is specific to multi monitor setups running games in windowed mode, but I've noticed remarkable differences when running just different web pages on Chrome.

Facebook, using hardware acceleration, caused stuttering and really did more damage to the framerate than I thought possible for a web page (~10fps), while a text-only webpage had no noticeable effect.

Good detail although there are alternate ways to drive the thermistor. Something to note is that the circuit in Figure 2 reduces the dynamic range of the ADC, something that may be of concern if you only have an 8 bit ADC available.